Tag Archives: data centre

For the last few years the mantra has been the same: “cloud is the destination”, by which we assume public cloud. The economics are obvious; why would organisations choose to maintain their own fixed cost data centres when they could use someone else’s facility and only pay for what they use?

For startups and smaller organisations who had no technical legacy to worry about, or who ran mainly on SaaS offerings, this was great – they could remove those servers lurking under desks or in cupboards. However for most of the customers I deal with (i.e. large corporate enterprises) it wasn’t this simple.

Back in 2014 there were confident predictions that over 80% of enterprise workloads would be running in public cloud within 5 years. 3 years later, and only a handful of those workloads have made the switch, and for the most part that’s been ‘lift and shift’ – moving from VMWare on-premise to VMWare in the cloud, for example. Enterprise customers aren’t seeing the often-promised flexibility and performance improvements which come from true refactoring of applications for cloud – their code is just too complex.

But it’s not just the code that’s a problem. There is a reluctance on the part of many business leaders to commit to ‘letting go’ of their data. I’ve heard it said that this is about mindset and perception (after all, pretty much every major data breach has been from a customer’s own data centre). However there are often challenging legislative and regulatory reasons why this may be the case.

In the EU, for example, data about EU citizens has to stay within the European Economic Area, unless the country it is sent to can maintain an “adequate level of protection”. What does that mean? How do you prove it? What controls do you have over the nationality of data centre employees in third party countries?

Yet enterprises want the flexibility that cloud brings just as much as anyone else – after all, their survival could depend on it. New disruptors with no technical debt are using cloud-native technology to take customers from the incumbents.

And so we’re seeing a subtle shift – new offerings bringing the benefits of cloud, but in the customer’s own data centre – not just VMWare, but containers, Cloud Foundry, even serverless compute platforms, all designed to run on kit which the customer already has.

In June IBM announcedIBM Cloud Private, a software-based IaaS and PaaS platform combining Kubernetes (for containers) and Terraform (for VMWare). It’s aimed squarely at those customers who run their business with Java Enterprise applications, and who want to migrate to more cloud-like technologies in their own space. Microsoft has Azure Stack, for customers coming from a .NET world.

No surprises there – IBM and Microsoft have always been big in the enterprise space. What’s interesting is that Google have teamed up with Pivotal and VMWare to bring their flavour of containers to an on-premise audience, and even AWS have acknowledged that customers may still want to use their own servers.

The end of the private data centre will happen, one day. But that day may just be a little further off now, as enterprises are given more options for flexible deployment behind their own firewall. When legislation catches up with technology, or encryption improves, that may change, but it’s still a long way off.

Most organisations have legacy applications, running in a data centre, usually on mainframes or other servers. These so-called ‘Systems of Record’, such as payroll, banking transactions, inventory, insurance policy data, and so on, often use specific applications which were not written with flexibility in mind. They are frequently tied to specific pieces of hardware or specific platforms, and moving them to more modern platforms can be difficult.

This creates inefficiencies. If one of the servers is running at capacity, then you need to buy a bigger server to run that application, even if there is spare capacity elsewhere in the data centre.

This brings us to workload portability. Industry standard technologies such as OpenStack and Docker can help us to make our application workloads portable – in other words, we can take them off their fixed, legacy system and run them on any suitable machine in our data centre – typically a rack of commodity servers with OpenStack installed on them.

Congratulations! You’ve created a cloud environment, and your portable application workloads can be placed there. Now, if you run out of space, you can simply add more.

Even better, the same applies to other data centres. You can rent a cloud environment from an external provider, such as Amazon, SoftLayer or Rackspace, and deploy the same portable workloads there as well – so you can cover peak periods, or simply remove some of the fixed costs from your own data centre.

But what if your workloads are very predictable and unchanging? Innovation will change all that. A single app used by your customers to access order data, bank transactions, etc, can radically alter the workload profile of your critical applications. Moving to a more flexible and elastic environment can help to address that.

Of course, with great flexibility comes great responsibility. In the old world, your mission-critical application ran on ‘that box over there’. In the new world, you may not even know which country it’s running in. You therefore need to make sure you have good visibility and governance of your cloud environments. You need to understand what is running where, what the policies are for data and application placement, and who has agreed to any changes.

A cloud orchestration layer will provide this. It can make sure that, for example, you always have your critical applications spread across multiple, geographically separate data centres – in case there is a power failure or some other disaster at one of them. Or, if you’re a European company, that an application with Personally Identifiable Information is always placed within the European Union.

In summary, making your workloads portable and properly orchestrating them will help to create a flexible and elastic environment for your critical applications, move fixed costs out and convert them to variable, and provide a solid foundation for doing innovation.